12 Minutes to a Better Brain: Neuroscientist Reveals the #1 Habit for Clarity & Focus

Mel Robbins 0:00 You said attention is something that you hold.

Dr. Amishi Jha 0:04 Your attention is an extremely powerful capacity that you hold, but it's incredibly fragile. The very hopeful news, and we'll talk about how to do this, is that it is trainable.

Mel Robbins 0:17 Hey, it's Mel. Today on The Mel Robbins Podcast, you're gonna learn how to build a better brain in just 12 minutes a day. This is one habit for clarity and focus that's researched back from neuroscientist Dr. Amishi Jha.

Dr. Amishi Jha 0:30 Attention is an incredibly powerful brain system, that's the first thing. We already know that. It is, in some sense, the boss of the brain. Wherever attention goes, the rest of the brain's computational functions are aligned with whatever it is that you pay attention to. That's why it's so powerful. The metaphor I like to use is that it's like a flashlight. Wherever it is that that flashlight is directed toward, you get crisper, clearer information.

Mel Robbins 0:55 What do you think the most important thing to do is?

Dr. Amishi Jha 0:59 The biggest call to action, and it's a very simple one, is pay attention to your attention. Focusing, noticing, refocusing, repeat. That's the push-up for the mind.

Mel Robbins 1:12 What happens if you do this 12 minutes a day, four days a week for four weeks?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:17 Really good news, you're gonna get better than where you started. The best time to do it is that, when you're gonna do it.

Mel Robbins 1:22 Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to The Mel Robbins Podcast. Dr. Amishi Jha, thank you, thank you, thank you for hopping on a plane and being here with us in our Boston studios. Welcome to The Mel Robbins Podcast.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:40 Thank you. It's so great to be here.

Mel Robbins 1:42 I am so excited because I gotta be honest with you. Is it common when people interview you for them to feel like (laughs) they are unfocused? You know, as I was preparing for this, I was like, "Wait a minute, why am I suddenly feeling all scattered before Dr. Amishi walks in here?"

Dr. Amishi Jha 2:00 (laughs)

Mel Robbins 2:00 Is that like a thing that happens with people?

Dr. Amishi Jha 2:03 I certainly don't want it to feel like some kind of, like, test of your attentional capabilities at all. Because frankly, all the work that I do comes from my own journey with attention.

Mel Robbins 2:12 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 2:12 It doesn't matter how much expertise I have, it doesn't matter how much I study this, the notion of having a crisis of attention or feeling scattered every now and then is part of the human experience. So, please don't feel that. (laughs)

Mel Robbins 2:23 Thank you for saying that, 'cause I think when you, when you think about attention and focus and training your mind to be a peak mind, you all of a sudden sit up and lean in and you're like, "Okay, we got stuff to do." And so there was something very, I think, optimistic and accessible to this idea that you are gonna have a scattered mind at times.

Dr. Amishi Jha 2:47 Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Mel Robbins 2:48 And I take it you're gonna teach us how to recognize that and pull your attention back to what's important when you do.

Dr. Amishi Jha 2:55 Yeah, with no promise that you're gonna necessarily be less scattered. But through the journey of what we'll talk about, hopefully come to an understanding that as we become more intimately familiar and friendlier with our own mind, we treat that scatter differently.

Mel Robbins 3:11 Mm. Intimately familiar and friendlier with our own mind. That is so cool. You know

Mel Robbins 3:17 what I'd love to have you do, because your research is so interesting, and the results are mind-blowing. I would love to have you speak directly to the person who's with us right now, they're listening or they're watching us right now, and they have not a lot of time, but they have made the time to be here to learn from you. And I would love to have you share a little bit about what might be different about their life if they take to heart everything you're about to teach us today and they apply it.

Dr. Amishi Jha 3:51 Absolutely. So, the one thing I will say is that your attention is an extremely powerful capacity that you hold, but it's incredibly fragile. It's going to fall apart every now and then. It's going to be scattered. The very hopeful news, and we'll talk about how to do this, is that it is trainable. We can train our attention to be stronger and function better. And this isn't just some abstract thing that we wanna be able to do. We do this because we wanna not only have a peak mind, but we wanna have a fulfilling life. We wanna befriend our own mind for the service of enjoying our life and making sure that what we do is meaningful to us. So, the path there is what we'll be talking about during our time together.

Mel Robbins 4:36 There was something that you just said that really caught my attention. I didn't even mean to make a pun, but it just fell out of my mouth. You said attention is something that you hold. And hear what was interesting about that. My experience of the concept or the term attention is that it's something that kinda comes and goes. I have it, I don't have it, it's all over the place, I'm trying to grab it. When you said attention is something that you hold, almost like I'm holding your book, Peak Mind, it made me look at it differently.

Dr. Amishi Jha 5:12 Hmm.

Mel Robbins 5:13 Because the word hold, attention is something that you hold, it means it is in your power at any time to recognize that you're the one that holds it, you're the one that can learn how to direct it, that it is always there for you to be able to use to your advantage. And I've never thought about it that way, because I think as somebody that's really struggled with directing my attention, with being very scattered all the time, easily distracted, which I think is probably most people these days, I've always felt almost powerless around it, and I've made myself wrong-

Dr. Amishi Jha 5:48 Mm.

Mel Robbins 5:48 ... in many instances about my inability to focus on something or my inability to stay organized or my inability to remember things. And thinking about it differently, like, no, no, no, no, attention is something that you hold.

Dr. Amishi Jha 6:02 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 6:02 The power is in your hands, and today you're gonna help us tap into it.I really love that.

Dr. Amishi Jha 6:07 Can I say something about that?

Mel Robbins 6:08 Please.

Dr. Amishi Jha 6:09 So one of the things that I wanna say, just at the outset, is that this notion of holding our attention can give us that sense of agency, which is really, really powerful. But I would like you to just consider expanding what it means to hold.

Mel Robbins 6:22 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 6:22 Kind of like the way we think about maybe holding our child.

Mel Robbins 6:25 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 6:25 That there's a holding that is an aspect of, you know, you're gonna support and control in some ways, just like we would when we parent. But there's also just a letting it be there and observing it. And w- as we talk through the various types of attention, we'll realize that holding can mean all of those things. It can mean directing it, it can mean acknowledging it, it can mean checking in with it without doing anything differently. And as we expand the repertoire of how we hold our attention-

Mel Robbins 6:51 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 6:51 ... we can develop that sense of friendliness and self-supportive orientation toward our own mind.

Mel Robbins 6:56 Oh, I love that, 'cause I'm realizing as you said that, "Just letting it be." I'm like, "But I'm gripping the wheel, Dr. Amishi." (laughs) What is attention?

Dr. Amishi Jha 7:04 Yeah. Yeah.

Mel Robbins 7:04 Like, not, not like the buzzword, but, you know, y- this is what you research as a neuroscientist in your life. What exactly is attention in your brain?

Dr. Amishi Jha 7:14 Right. So attention is an incredibly powerful brain system. That's the first thing. We already know that.

Mel Robbins 7:19 It's a brain system.

Dr. Amishi Jha 7:20 It is. And it doesn't actually fully develop till we're about 25 years old.

Mel Robbins 7:24 Wait, what?

Dr. Amishi Jha 7:25 Yes. (laughs) And that age, 25, is because attention relies on a very important part of the brain that's quite slow to develop, the prefrontal cortex.

Mel Robbins 7:34 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 7:35 So we need our attention for everything that we do and things like thinking, things like feeling, things like connecting with other people, all of those require our attention.

Mel Robbins 7:48 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 7:48 Before we talk about in more detail what attention is and all of the different ways that it functions, I think it might be useful to mention something about why we even have an attention system.

Mel Robbins 7:58 Great.

Dr. Amishi Jha 7:58 Through the course of human evolution, we are benefited by the fact that we hold this thing called attention in our own brain.

Mel Robbins 8:04 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 8:05 That the idea that we consider is that this system developed because of a very big problem that the brain had, and this is even before we were human beings, which is that there's far more information in the environment than the brain can fully process. So already, you have an overloaded system.

Mel Robbins 8:22 Uh-huh.

Dr. Amishi Jha 8:23 If you cannot fully understand and process everything happening, you've gotta come up with a solution. So the solution of attention is to prioritize a subset of information that's available to us and use the full computational power of our brain to interrogate it, to understand it, and then sort of sample it bit by bit to put together everything that we might be surrounded by. And frankly, as we developed as organisms, even to understand fully what's going on within us. So we use our attention to prioritize

Dr. Amishi Jha 8:56 some information over other information and use that to benefit our understanding of what's happening in our environment, internal and external.

Mel Robbins 9:04 So you could think about your attention system-

Dr. Amishi Jha 9:08 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 9:08 ... as this super computer function that is sorting through information and prioritizing it and helping us make sense of it?

Dr. Amishi Jha 9:18 Yes, eh, but it prioritizes it in multiple ways. In fact, attention isn't one thing.

Mel Robbins 9:22 Yep.

Dr. Amishi Jha 9:23 It's actually three things. It's a trio of functions that, that are probably gonna be important to think about, because it helps us understand that to do this prioritizing, we need to orient to our experience in multiple ways.

Mel Robbins 9:35 So what is happening in your brain when you're using this attention system?

Dr. Amishi Jha 9:41 Yeah. So it is biasing every single thing that the brain does. It is, in some sense, the boss of the brain.

Mel Robbins 9:50 Really?

Dr. Amishi Jha 9:51 Wherever attention goes, the rest of the brain's computational functions are aligned with whatever it is that you pay attention to. That's why it's so powerful, because when you're paying attention to the right things, meaning those that serve you and align with what you're trying to do, great. But when you are not, everything is basically going to go in the wrong direction.

Mel Robbins 10:10 Now here's a crazy question, because when I hear the word attention, I think eyeballs and ears. Is there other parts of the body... This is gonna sound so... I'm, I'm, I'm, like, feeling self-conscious.

Dr. Amishi Jha 10:22 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 10:22 I'm, I'm paying attention to the fact that I'm feeling self-conscious-

Dr. Amishi Jha 10:25 (laughs)

Mel Robbins 10:25 ... about my question. But are there other parts of the body that are also ways that you pay attention?

Dr. Amishi Jha 10:34 Absolutely. Every sensory system connects with attention.

Mel Robbins 10:38 Huh?

Dr. Amishi Jha 10:39 And it's not just about our perceptual ability or our sensory experience. Even the internal domain of our entire minds is accessible through attention. So when we talk through the various types of attention, I think that'll become, uh, very, very clear. But you honed in on the right thing, which is that attention is tied to perception. And what it does and one way it functions is by turning up the volume on what you hear, making more clear what you see.

Mel Robbins 11:09 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 11:09 If it has to do with our sensory experience, it's like amplifying the tactile input that we get. It is a type of amplifier. And, uh, we can use various metaphors to describe what the brain does when we, when we talk about this. Um, this

Dr. Amishi Jha 11:22 particular way of paying attention, that's about, um, prioritizing inputs-

Mel Robbins 11:27 Yeah.

Dr. Amishi Jha 11:27 ... selecting information and prioritizing that. The metaphor I like to use is that it's like a flashlight.

Mel Robbins 11:33 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 11:34 So if you were in a darkened room-

Mel Robbins 11:36 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 11:37 ... flashlight's a very handy tool. Why?

Mel Robbins 11:38 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 11:39 Because wherever it is that that flashlight is directed toward, you get crisper, clearer information. And that notion of advantaging perception through attention, very real. We see that when we look at brain imaging studies, we look, when we look at brain wave recordings. Right now, for example, as I look at you-

Mel Robbins 11:56 Yeah.

Dr. Amishi Jha 11:57 ... the parts of my brain that are doing face processing are more active, because I'm getting the visual input from you. And everything ar- else around your face is a little dulled out. I'm not getting strong input from that.

Mel Robbins 12:07 Well, that's true, because, and, and even if you're not watching this-... is you're listening to Dr. Amishi. Your flashlight, so to speak, is dialing up and paying attention to listening to her voice. And you may not be paying attention or noticing as much other sounds outside, or even kind of the room that you're in, because you are more focused on the words that you're listening to. Is that kind of how this works?

Dr. Amishi Jha 12:38 Absolutely, absolutely. Right. So the au- auditory input is gonna be increased.

Mel Robbins 12:42 Yeah.

Dr. Amishi Jha 12:43 And then everything else that follows from that. So because you're honing in on certain words, your comprehension of those words is gonna be better. The thoughts that you have based on those words is gonna be more fine-grained. The memories that might get elicited by those words, everything else follows from the fact that you're getting this better input from what it is that you're paying attention to.

Mel Robbins 13:03 That's so helpful because I, you know, just as a normal person, when you hear the word attention, I always have just thought about the act of looking at something, paying attention, like just sitting still. And it didn't even dawn on me that there is a much larger system and mechanism that has massive issues to deal with to keep you alive, and to be crunching the data to determine everything that's happening at any given time. And kind of starting from that point is very helpful, because it's so easy to get down on yourself if you can't pay attention, or if you're scatterbrained. And if you start with this bigger understanding, like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, your attention system has big-ass jobs. So let's not just keep trashing yourself right now, and let's hold it a little more gently, and let's learn how to work with it." You know, Dr. Amishi, in Peak Mind and all your research, you break attention into three systems. What are they?

Dr. Amishi Jha 14:08 The flashlight, which is selective attention. The floodlight, the alerting system. And the juggler, which is executive functioning.

Mel Robbins 14:17 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 14:17 This trio of functions. The first one we already talked about, and we, this flashlight metaphor describes it. We might sometimes, we might call that focus.

Mel Robbins 14:25 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 14:25 When we say we focus, we're really talking about the flashlight, which is we hone in, we're narrow, we're restricted. We're, we have this sense of agency. We can direct the flashlight.

Mel Robbins 14:34 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 14:34 Wherever it is that that flashlight is pointing, we get prioritized information from there. Everything else is dulled out. The important thing to think about with that is that it is not only important for the external environment, so that we're, you know, like you said, we think about our eyes as, as attending. Um, but we can use that same resource for the internal environment.

Mel Robbins 14:55 What do you mean?

Dr. Amishi Jha 14:55 So, yeah. So if I ask you right now to think about what you had for dinner last night. You don't have to tell me, but can you, can you think of it?

Mel Robbins 15:06 Yes.

Dr. Amishi Jha 15:06 Okay. Were you thinking about it before I asked you about it?

Mel Robbins 15:08 No.

Dr. Amishi Jha 15:09 Right. So what happened in that moment? Could you, could you-

Mel Robbins 15:11 I don't know. What happened? (laughs)

Dr. Amishi Jha 15:11 I'll tell you-

Narrator 15:12 (laughs)

Dr. Amishi Jha 15:12 ... but could you, could you bring it to mind, like actually visualize what you were having?

Mel Robbins 15:16 Yes.

Dr. Amishi Jha 15:16 Okay. So-

Mel Robbins 15:17 I could, and then I thought, "I hope she doesn't ask me what it was, because I ordered so many different things off the menu."

Dr. Amishi Jha 15:23 (laughs)

Mel Robbins 15:23 You would be like, "Wait, what? You had eight different dishes of food last night?" Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 15:29 (laughs) But the cool thing is that you were able to access that. So what happened in that moment? My cue, my prompt, dinner last night, required you to kind of bring up the entire episode of your evening. From that, you used your flashlight to hone in on the specific episode of dinner. Then you even went even more fine-grained and visualized, maybe, maybe even if you thought about it and it was a delicious meal, you might even get your, you know, mouth might, might start watering. So this ability to pay attention is what allows us to have access to everything we hold in our memory.

Mel Robbins 15:57 That's exactly what happened. Because the second you said it, it's as if I flooded the movie scene of my mind. I was in the restaurant. I was with the three people I was with. Then I immediately zoned in on the pasta dish, bright green pesto, absolutely delicious.

Dr. Amishi Jha 16:17 That sounds delicious. (laughs)

Mel Robbins 16:17 And then all of a sudden, my mouth started to go, like I was like ... And you're, that, that's incredible. And I bet as you were listening or watching, Dr. Amishi, you probably were like, "Oh. Yeah, I remember what I had last night."

Dr. Amishi Jha 16:28 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 16:29 That is so cool-

Dr. Amishi Jha 16:30 That is, that is.

Mel Robbins 16:30 ... that, that we can do that.

Dr. Amishi Jha 16:31 Yeah. So I think that the flashlight gives a sense of agency. You hold the flashlight, you can willfully direct it. You can give yourself guidance to do that. Somebody else can prompt you to do that. But there's another thing to keep in mind, uh, about this flashlight metaphor, beyond the fact that we use it for the external environment and the internal environment.

Mel Robbins 16:48 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 16:49 Which is that it can also be grabbed or yanked.

Mel Robbins 16:53 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 16:54 So if you actually think like you were walking down a path at night, and you've got this wonderful flashlight tool, so handy, you can maneuver your way, et cetera. If you heard a strange sound of rustling in the, in the, you know, in the foliage around you, all of a sudden the flashlight is gonna go directly to where you thought you heard that sound come from. Why? Because literally it grabbed your attention. It could be something concerning, it could be an animal, whatever it is. So we have to keep in mind that not only can we direct it and do we have agency, but we are vulnerable to it being captured.

Mel Robbins 17:25 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 17:25 And that capture is not only for the external environment, it's also the internal environment.

Mel Robbins 17:30 What's your take on multitasking? Like is that even possible? Is that like a myth?

Dr. Amishi Jha 17:34 (laughs) So this whole time, you know, and you've been going with me on this. So, I didn't notice, I never said flashlights of attention. Right? I said flashlight of attention. Our attention has this unitary quality. When we think we're multitasking, what we think we're doing is, "I got five tasks, and I got a flashlight in each of them, and I'm good. I'm doing all of it at once." And you are, whoever's thinking this, you're kidding yourself. (laughs) Because multitasking actually doesn't exist. What we're doing is task switching.So if you've got more than one attentionally demanding thing that you've, you're trying to do-

Mel Robbins 18:10 Uh-huh.

Dr. Amishi Jha 18:10 ... you are putting the flashlight on that task.

Mel Robbins 18:13 Yeah.

Dr. Amishi Jha 18:13 Now you're removing it, you're engaging in another task, removing it, engaging in another task. And if you want to exhaust your attention system, feel free to continue multitasking. It is a terrible way to expend out, spend out all of your attentional energy. Because that engaging and disengaging, I mean, think about it like gears in a, in a car.

Mel Robbins 18:34 Uh-huh.

Dr. Amishi Jha 18:34 And we've gotta kinda get in whatever mode you're in, but then you gotta shift out of it. And if you do this, uh, enough times, there's gonna be a couple things that'll happen. You're gonna make a lot more mistakes, you're gonna tank your mood. And whatever it is that you're, uh, trying to achieve, you're, you're gonna lose what you're trying to achieve and not be able to do it.

Mel Robbins 18:53 That makes a lot of sense.

Dr. Amishi Jha 18:55 So yeah, so my guidance would just be mono-task as much as possible. And, and, and privilege mono-tasking. Like do not see it as a badge of honor to try to multitask,

Dr. Amishi Jha 19:06 because it's not helping you.

Mel Robbins 19:07 Like you got one flashlight, baby.

Dr. Amishi Jha 19:08 You got one flashlight. So-

Mel Robbins 19:09 So the first subsystem is the selective attention, and that's-

Dr. Amishi Jha 19:13 Yes.

Mel Robbins 19:13 ... the flashlight.

Dr. Amishi Jha 19:14 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 19:14 What's the second one?

Dr. Amishi Jha 19:15 The second one is almost the exact opposite of the flashlight. It's not narrow and restrictive. It's broad and receptive. So the way that I would describe this is, I mean, an experience would be if you're wa- if you're driving a car, let's say we're walking, and all of a sudden you're in the middle of a school zone. You know, you see flashing lights. What happens in that moment? You might even say to yourself, "Pay attention," but that's not this narrow, restricted type of attention. It's broad and receptive. You don't know if you're having a strange traffic pattern or you gotta watch out for children or vehicles or whatever it is. You're paying attention, but what you're prioritizing is actually everything happening right now.

Mel Robbins 19:52 And that's what happens when you walk into a room, right? Like if you've ever walked into like a, a networking meeting or a school cafeteria, you kind of see everything, right?

Dr. Amishi Jha 20:01 Right. I mean, if you're going into that room with the idea that you gotta meet one person and you're looking for them, then you're gonna use that flashlight.

Mel Robbins 20:07 Right.

Dr. Amishi Jha 20:07 But if you're going in kind of warm and open to what's gonna happen, you're gonna be using this second system, which the metaphor I use for this is that it's like a floodlight.

Mel Robbins 20:15 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 20:16 It's broad and diffused, and it's formally called the brain's alerting system because it is about being alert and receptive. And the important thing to think about with that is just like the flashlight, it can be for the external environment or the internal environment. So we can be broad and receptive if we're around people and we just wanna take in the social scene. But from the internal point of view, it'd be something like a brainstorming session. All options are on the table. What's arising right now?

Mel Robbins 20:44 Got it.

Dr. Amishi Jha 20:44 Be present to everything here right now. And so whereas the flashlight privileges content, you know, the thing you're trying to hone in on-

Mel Robbins 20:51 Uh-huh.

Dr. Amishi Jha 20:53 ... the f- uh, floodlight privileges the moment right now.

Mel Robbins 20:56 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 20:57 And if you... It makes sense because you can't actually be alert, you can't save up being alert for the past or for the future. It's right now. So that is what we're trying to do when we're talking about that. And the, these systems, by the way, I'm just describing them with metaphors, but we know that they have very specific brain networks that support them.

Mel Robbins 21:15 Huh.

Dr. Amishi Jha 21:16 And these brain networks are actually antagonistic toward each other.

Dr. Amishi Jha 21:19 They fight each other. So you can't be both narrow and restrictive and broad and receptive at the same time. They're actually battling each other in the brain.

Mel Robbins 21:27 And what's the third system?

Dr. Amishi Jha 21:29 Yes. So the third system is, the metaphor I'll use 'cause I think that's a good way to anchor around it, is that it's like a juggler.

Mel Robbins 21:35 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 21:35 And this is something we call executive functions. So that term executive is very much like the executive of any enterprise, right?

Mel Robbins 21:42 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 21:42 The executive's job is to ensure, and that's what the system does, that our goals and our actions align. It's monitoring and, uh, and checking in on what's going on. So the juggler's like you got all the balls in the air, you got multiple things you're trying to do, but you're overseeing the coordination of that so that none of the balls drop.

Mel Robbins 22:02 So can you give me an example of like daily life?

Dr. Amishi Jha 22:05 All the ti- Everything we do pretty much. Like even just, uh, you know, making my way here, right? Planning ahead to what I have to do to get myself to the airport or, you know, I've got, you know, I've got a, a plan to make sure I've got... The goal is to get to the airport on time, all the things that need to happen in whatever order, to sequence and manage. Um, and it ends up that if you, um, if the system is not working great, um, you're not gonna be having the right goal. You either forget the goal or your, or your behavior is not aligned with the goal. Um, and when that happens, the system has to kick in to fix things. So either update the goal, like all of a sudden if I'm planning on going to the airport and I realize, I learn through a text message, "You have six hours, your flight's delayed," (laughs) it would be a bad goal to continue on that path to try to get there within an hour. So I've gotta update the goal. No longer have the goal of getting there. But if I, all of a sudden instead of, uh, you know, that kind of a situation decide, "You know what? I think I'm gonna check a few more emails." Well, now my actions aren't aligned with my goals, so I've gotta fix my action. No, no, no. Put the phone down, get yourself packed, and get there. So this system is so good and so important for us being able to make sure that moment by moment in our lives that we are aware of the goal, we're checking in with what we're doing, and we're constantly negotiating between those two. Is this the right thing or is... my action have to be, uh, corrected? And, and when there, when we are successful, everything feels fluid. You know, the balls are up in the air and everything's great. And when it's not functioning well, we feel that too. (laughs) Like, I failed at me- meeting this goal or ensuring that my actions align with that goal.

Mel Robbins 23:40 It's interesting that you said that the attention system doesn't fully develop until 25.

Dr. Amishi Jha 23:45 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 23:46 And so is it really common, especially for somebody that is younger or a young adult or a child, to have a delayed development in the attention system because it takes time for these things to develop?

Dr. Amishi Jha 24:01 Absolutely. And oftentimes what might... Like, somebody may be characterized as having attentional problems, but then by early adulthood, they're totally fine.

Mel Robbins 24:09 Yeah.

Dr. Amishi Jha 24:10 Because in some sense, whatever that path was, whatever that timeframe was-... full maturation happened and then they were fine.

Mel Robbins 24:16 Yes.

Dr. Amishi Jha 24:16 Um, but the other thing to keep in mind about this aging-related aspect is not only does it slow to develop, but it's also fast to decline. (laughs) So-

Mel Robbins 24:26 What do you mean?

Dr. Amishi Jha 24:26 (laughs) So in general, all three of these systems of attention, flashlight, floodlight, juggler, this kind of category of attention, doesn't fully develop till we're 25. Then we've got a good, solid 10-year run, 25 to 35, where our attention, all three systems are functioning quite well.

Mel Robbins 24:42 Okay. Peak, peak attention.

Dr. Amishi Jha 24:43 But if you're older than 35, then we're on sort of a normal, healthy aging downward slog of the functioning-

Mel Robbins 24:49 Why at 35?

Dr. Amishi Jha 24:50 ... of our attention.

Mel Robbins 24:50 That sucks. Like, we got a lot of life to live, Dr. Amishi.

Dr. Amishi Jha 24:53 (laughs) .

Mel Robbins 24:53 Why is it declining at 35?

Dr. Amishi Jha 24:54 That's just the nature of the brain. So partly, we think this is because then the kind of habits people start engaging in.

Mel Robbins 25:00 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 25:00 Um, and this is actually the kind of point of everything that I've been up to in my lab, which is that if we know our attention is vulnerable, how can we train it? What are the best ways that we can spend a little bit of time every day so that we can keep our attention in peak shape?

Mel Robbins 25:14 So based on all the research that you've done, you can train this system to be stronger and to work better for you?

Dr. Amishi Jha 25:23 Absolutely.

Mel Robbins 25:24 What made you wanna study all this?

Dr. Amishi Jha 25:26 (laughs) So attention was just a topic that I was fascinated by because really, I was interested in a, a kind of a bigger topic, which was you might use the technical term neuroplasticity.

Mel Robbins 25:39 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 25:40 The power of the brain to change itself.

Mel Robbins 25:43 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 25:44 And, you know, originally when my early days, I thought I was gonna be a medical doctor. I thought maybe, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll be in hospitals helping patients. Pretty soon I realized, no, that's not gonna be for me. I'm not gonna be a great clinician. It's, doesn't motivate me.

Mel Robbins 25:58 You don't like people. You can say it.

Dr. Amishi Jha 25:58 I don't li-

Mel Robbins 25:58 You don't like people. I'm just kidding.

Dr. Amishi Jha 25:59 I love people.

Mel Robbins 26:00 (laughs)

Dr. Amishi Jha 26:00 But I don't necessarily want about... uh, be around people solving their problems when they're not well.

Mel Robbins 26:05 Yes.

Dr. Amishi Jha 26:05 That was not the thing that was exciting to me. I really lucked out very early in my, uh, journey to trying to become a, a, a physician that helped me realize (laughs) that I don't wanna do this by volunteering in a brain injury unit. And this was when I was at the en- at the end of high school. And, um, uh, my job was, you know, what they called candy stripers in those days.

Mel Robbins 26:26 Yeah.

Dr. Amishi Jha 26:26 We'd go around-

Mel Robbins 26:27 Making the beds, yep.

Dr. Amishi Jha 26:27 ... we'd help the patients. It was really more they... Thankfully, I was able to interact with patients-

Mel Robbins 26:30 Yep.

Dr. Amishi Jha 26:30 ... at that point. And I super lucked out because the position I had was in a brain injury unit.

Mel Robbins 26:36 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 26:37 And I was starting to get that feeling of probably I'm not gonna be able to deal with medical school, but I really think this brain thing is very, very cool. And one of the patients that I met really was sort of my light bulb moment. Um, he had, uh, come in. It was a, it was sort of a long-term care facility to help people rehabil- rehabilitate after brain injury. And he was... had been in a motorcycle accident. In fact, for the most of the time I knew him, I thought he was a quadriplegic. So I would have the fun job of, you know, getting him sort of outside for some fresh air-

Mel Robbins 27:07 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 27:07 ... and ha- be his conversation partner. And he was in a chair that was very clearly for a quadriplegic. And then, you know, a few months later, all of a sudden he's in a very different chair and I see him moving the chair by himself with one of his fingers. And in our conversations, I, I learned that he was doing physical therapy and he was recovering function. And at night he would te- he'd tel- he told me that, you know, "Yeah, I'm going to PT every day, but you know what I do that's really cool? At night when I'm trying to fall asleep, what I do is I exercise my brain." And I was kind of like, "What?" He said, "I close my eyes and I visualize my hand moving that little lever on my wheelchair. I'm exercising that pathway over and over again." And that type of mental exercise he felt was really, really helpful to him so that it, uh, it made it faster for him to be able to actually do that. To me, that was, like, amazing. What? You're exercising your brain and you ch- you're changing your brain? You know, fast forward now, I'm in graduate school and absolutely he was, he was absolutely right. Mental practice is a way to strengthen the brain. So when my, um, uh, first child was, was very young, I had just started my first job as a faculty member. At that point, I was at the University of Pennsylvania. In my lab, we studied attention. That's literally if anybody at the university got a call from any media that said, "We wanna learn about attention," they'd call me. And while he was a young child and my husband was in grad school, we bought a 100-year-old fixer-upper-

Mel Robbins 28:33 (laughs)

Dr. Amishi Jha 28:34 ... I was in such a state that I felt I could not pay attention. And it was, like, annoying. I'm like, "I know about this system." Like, "Just come on, get it together, pay attention." And then I'm like, "Okay, fine. I gotta go beyond myself. There's gotta be solutions in the literature." Going into literature, what I realized is there really is no advice. There was no solid advice on what you do when it's not a, it's not a clinical disorder. It really is I don't feel like I have hold of my own flashlight.

Mel Robbins 29:02 Mm. Uh-huh.

Dr. Amishi Jha 29:03 So what do I do? And I kept coming up empty. What I also knew is that this was just not acceptable. I mean, I had made a commitment that even though I was gonna be a busy professional, what was really important to me was gonna stay central to my life. And in that moment, it was making sure no matter what my day looked like, at the end of the day, I was gonna sit down with my baby and read him a book. And I started noticing that I couldn't even be there for those moments where I was doing this thing that I had promised myself and I knew was the most important thing I was gonna do all day. And it got me super panicked.

Mel Robbins 29:37 Yeah.

Dr. Amishi Jha 29:37 Like, "Ugh, not only do I study this and not know what to do, but this is, this is consequential. If I can't show up now, what's it gonna be like when he actually really needs me?"

Mel Robbins 29:46 Yeah.

Dr. Amishi Jha 29:47 And so I kind of became, um, interested in figuring out what to do about it. What is it that I can, uh, do to bring some tools into my life? And I was very, very fortunate that by chance, a colleague of mine, uh, suggested something I might try. Not so much to make my attention better, but really just to feel better.

Mel Robbins 30:09 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 30:09 Because it was obviously cascading into, "I can't pay attention. I don't feel good about that." And then it was turning into a mood problem. So all that stuff can start happening.And it was really the one word that got me, like, "What? What, this is what I should try?" And that word was meditation.

Mel Robbins 30:25 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 30:26 And at that moment (laughs) as a, again, a up-and-coming neuroscientist, a serious person who devoted her life to science, I was like, "Yeah, I'm not doing that." I was, I had written it off entirely. Um, not only because it was not (laughs) something that I, uh, thought a serious scientist would study at that point. This is the early 2000s.

Mel Robbins 30:45 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 30:46 But I had this whole cultural background where I had known about meditation. In fact, my earliest memories are seeing my parents meditating. And I thought it was great for them, but not something I would do. But I did give it a try. I actually went into Penn's bookstore and looked in the meditation section, and super lucked out because the book I ended up picking up was something called Meditation for Beginners by Jack Kornfield. And that got me to start following a path that was really about a s- uh, practices, um, that I could do daily, and it was actually a, a recording of a retreat, so he was giving guided practice. It was, the CD came with the book. And what I realized after about a month of doing this is not only did I felt like I was there again, I had control over my mind, my attention was back available to me, but that everything in these instructions was about attention. And so it became sort of like, "I've gotta study this." So my lab's entire research program sort of pivoted toward incorporating not just understanding how attention works, but what we can do to make it stronger and more capable in the face of high-stress circumstances, like those I was experiencing as a, as a professor. So part of my journey into why I'm interested in working with groups like elite performers and military and medical and nursing professionals is because we know, like all of us, attention matters, but there are going to be circumstances,

Dr. Amishi Jha 32:11 high-demand, high-stress circumstances, where it will become challenged and may fail. And nobody wants that to happen.

Mel Robbins 32:19 I love that your own experience had you turn your neuroscience researcher brain back on yourself, and that in an act of desperation, you're like, "Fine, I'll try this thing." Because I, uh, you know, when people hear the word meditation, they are, they're like, "I already know this," or they roll their eyes, right? And I love that it happened to you, because here you are studying attention academically, and you know that there's a deficit in research around what actually strengthens it, and if you even can. But now you're conducting an experiment (laughs) on yourself that pivots the entire trajectory of that lab, of the body of work and research that you've produced, and now what you have found when you're working with first responders and special forces and elite performers. And w- what happens to attention under stress? Like, how does this system-

Dr. Amishi Jha 33:18 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 33:18 ... of the spotlight, the floodlight, and the juggler get impacted when you're stressed out?

Dr. Amishi Jha 33:23 All of them fail. All of them fail. And we'll talk about specifically how they fail. But just wanted to say that, you know, if you d- if anybody deals with high-stress circumstances and it feels like life isn't working-

Mel Robbins 33:36 Yes.

Dr. Amishi Jha 33:36 ... that you're feeling fuzzy and foggy, probably the logical thing to do is change your life, just do something that doesn't produce those effects. Change your job, don't do as much stuff, uh, give up in some sense, and what-

Mel Robbins 33:49 But a lot of us can't.

Dr. Amishi Jha 33:50 Well, what I was gonna say is my whole orientation toward dealing with the situation that said, "I'm not changing my life, I am gonna change the way my brain functions," came from those formative experiences seeing, literally, a patient change his own brain. So the notion of neuroplasticity is the reason I turned toward the situation and said, "I've gotta figure out how to train this brain

Dr. Amishi Jha 34:14 so that it can face the challenges that it's experiencing right now." And I'm really glad that I ha- I happened to be a neuroscientist who knew that this was possible.

Mel Robbins 34:22 So after two decades of, like, digging into this, what are some of the biggest-

Dr. Amishi Jha 34:27 So-

Mel Robbins 34:27 ... insights that excite you?

Dr. Amishi Jha 34:28 Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest insights that excite me are that each of these systems, the flashlight, floodlight, and juggler, are incredibly powerful when we think about elite performers, but really anybody that-

Mel Robbins 34:41 Uh-huh.

Dr. Amishi Jha 34:41 ... would feel the sense of agency and success in their life. It doesn't ha- you don't have to be a, you know, an Olympian to experience this. But we know what that feels like when the flashlight is on the right thing, when you're broad and receptive when you wanna be, and narrow and selective when you wanna be, when the goals are in your mind and your actions are aligned with it. We know what that feels like. Some might even call it that feeling of flow. And many, many people that are exceptional in what they do are capable of that. They can do it. But the other thing to know is that people that are in these, um, demanding positions, and again, this is all of us, will reach that moment, because we're always gonna push ourselves-

Mel Robbins 35:16 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 35:17 ... it's almost like we push ourselves to the first moment of discomfort and we probably push past that. All of us who function fine under certain circumstances will be vulnerable to the flashlight not staying on the right thing, to feeling captured more than you want to, being overly broad when you know you need to narrow, or not narrow enough when you need to be narrow. Um, and w- what I've realized is that, um, for people undergoing multiple weeks, months of high demand, what they felt that they had the agency to do, what they felt was their peak performance will start to slip if the level of demand maintains itself.

Mel Robbins 35:59 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 35:59 So if you think about, um, somebody... And this happened to me. And in fact, one of the very first studies we did, uh, I, I went into a military base and I was talking to a group of Marines, and I was talking about some of the dangers of, of high-stress intervals. And literally, this (laughs) very tough and scary-looking Marine stands up and, and says, "No, ma'am. Stress activates me. I perform at my best under stress."And I was first like, "Oh, my gosh." Um, but he was right. He's right. It is the case that stress can be very powerful to get us to perform at our best. But what he also needed to understand, because we had already studied this, is if the moments, the circumstances that make you feel like this is the peak moment, if that level of demand persists, you are going to start dipping into distress and dysfunction.

Mel Robbins 36:48 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 36:48 And, and, uh, there is a very specific law, uh, within psychology called the Yerkes-Dodson law that explains this. And again-

Mel Robbins 36:56 The Yerkes-Dodson law?

Dr. Amishi Jha 36:57 Yes. (laughs)

Mel Robbins 36:57 That sounds like a dog...

Dr. Amishi Jha 36:58 (laughs) No, it's not a breed-

Mel Robbins 37:01 It's a cross between a Yorkie and a Dachshund.

Dr. Amishi Jha 37:03 (laughs)

Mel Robbins 37:03 (laughs)

Dr. Amishi Jha 37:03 It's not a new, it's not a new breed of dog. But basically, think about it like this. It's, uh, think of a graph and the, uh, graph has an inverted U shape, like just a U upside down.

Mel Robbins 37:14 An upside down U.

Dr. Amishi Jha 37:14 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 37:15 Yep.

Dr. Amishi Jha 37:15 So on, on the X axis is the level of stress. Low stress to high stress.

Mel Robbins 37:23 Got it.

Dr. Amishi Jha 37:24 And on the Y axis is your performance. Not performing well, excellent performance.

Mel Robbins 37:28 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 37:29 So what we know is that when stress is low, so something like you need to get your taxes done, but not till next April. Stress is low, performance is low. We're not gonna engage when there's no demand.

Mel Robbins 37:39 Yeah, the- the flashlight's off.

Dr. Amishi Jha 37:41 Yeah, of course.

Mel Robbins 37:41 I- I'm thinking about something else right now.

Dr. Amishi Jha 37:43 Exactly.

Mel Robbins 37:43 So I got no stress about my taxes right now.

Dr. Amishi Jha 37:44 As we get clo- higher and higher in terms of the amount of demand, performance will start picking up. It's, you know, a week or two before taxes are due, yeah, you're on it and you're gonna get it done.

Mel Robbins 37:54 Yeah.

Dr. Amishi Jha 37:54 Right? Now, if you, and now this analogy may fall apart. But if you maintain that level of stress over a longer period of time, past just that peak to allow you to get it done, you're gonna now go from the peak performance to dipping back down.

Mel Robbins 38:10 And isn't that what happened to you?

Dr. Amishi Jha 38:11 Absolutely.

Mel Robbins 38:11 Because you were under a period of chronic stress as a new mom, running a lab, a husband who's in graduate school. And that is so relatable because I think so many of us have a lot of pressure and we feel like we can't drop a ball. But then all of a sudden, all the balls in your brain are starting to drop and you can't, you feel like you just are losing it.

Dr. Amishi Jha 38:32 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 38:33 And I never thought about it as a overload on the stre- on the attention system that's controlling everything about you because of the way that the stress is impacting you and now-

Dr. Amishi Jha 38:48 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 38:48 ... the way that the system operates.

Dr. Amishi Jha 38:50 And I think what's more confusing to people is like, "Well, I mean, I can do this. I've been doing this." It's just that you haven't been doing it for that long.

Mel Robbins 38:56 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 38:57 And so even though outwardly everything looks like the same as it did when you were functioning fine, we forget the fact that we've been asking ourselves to perform at that level for a long period of time. And so when that Marine said to me, "No, stress activates me." He was right. But now after his fourth, fifth, sixth deployment, it's not gonna function the same, even if the level of challenge and demand is the same. And that's what I really wanted to get across, is that you actually are more vulnerable. Your performance is dipping. And unfortunately, one thing that goes in addition to your performance dipping is your awareness of your own performance is going to be less and less. So you become less and less aware that you're falling apart.

Mel Robbins 39:38 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 39:39 And, you know, that can be very catastrophic for people in those kinds of positions.

Mel Robbins 39:43 It's true.

Dr. Amishi Jha 39:43 Um, because it's not a child that's telling them, "Mommy, you're not paying attention." You know, it's other things that could be very, very consequential in life or death.

Mel Robbins 39:51 So what do elite performers and special forces and, you know, folks that are under, like, and first responders, under a lot of stress, how are they able to hold their attention better than the rest of us in those moments?

Dr. Amishi Jha 40:05 I don't think they are. They're not. So that's what we learned through multiple experiments. So the approach that the military takes to prepare people for high stress circumstances is that they do what's called stress inoculation training, or readiness training. So you put people through very, very grueling circumstances.

Mel Robbins 40:24 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 40:25 So they get habituated to that.

Mel Robbins 40:26 Right.

Dr. Amishi Jha 40:27 And that's part of your training. And then you're, you know, that's called also pre-deployment training. And then you're deployed to a war zone, let's say.

Mel Robbins 40:33 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 40:34 What I had the hunch, uh, my hunch was that that training in and of itself may actually deplete attention.

Mel Robbins 40:43 Oh.

Dr. Amishi Jha 40:43 So I asked if we could partner with military service members at the beginning of pre-deployment training, and then again, test them in terms of their attention, come back four to eight weeks later, test them again, and let me see how their attention looks.

Mel Robbins 40:57 And what did you discover?

Dr. Amishi Jha 40:58 That I was right. Unfortunately, I was right. What we found was that while their attention looked pretty good at the outset, after four to eight weeks of ongoing demands, their attention started to slip and they were significantly worse in their performance. And, you know, going, getting away from military service members, when we talk about, um, other groups, undergraduates, for example, going through the academic semester.

Mel Robbins 41:23 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 41:23 Same thing. From the beginning to the end of the semester, attention is worse. And think about that. Now they've gotta take final exams. Pre-season training for athletes, same idea. From the beginning to end of pre-season training, attention is worse. Now they're gonna compete. So this is a general approach to how the brain's gonna respond to a ongoing period of demand. And knowing this is troubling, but it also means maybe there's an opportunity to do something to protect against that.

Mel Robbins 41:50 Especially if we know we're about to step into

Mel Robbins 41:52 a period of our lives, or we are in one, where we are going to be experiencing a lot of stress.

Dr. Amishi Jha 41:57 Absolutely.

Mel Robbins 41:57 Or just really cranking on the attention system. One of my favorite moments in your book, Peak Mind, it's on page 156, is this story about a, you know, service member and their wife. And it was, uh, this story about something that the wife was always saying to her husband. And Cynthia was always saying to her husband, "Don't deploy before you deploy."... because through his multiple deployments, she had noticed that before he had physically gone to a war zone halfway around the world, he would already be mentally gone. Immediately, I thought of all the myriad ways so many of us might, quote, "deploy before we deploy," spending so much time in our heads planning and imagining the next upcoming thing, that we completely miss our lives in the moment. Can you unpack that insight for us because that is so... You don't have to be in the military to understand when you're not there because you're already six weeks ahead, or you're not here because you're thinking about something that's stressing you out at work. Like, talk to me about what's happening there.

Dr. Amishi Jha 43:13 Absolutely. So we were just talking about how high-demand intervals g- engage attention and deplete attention-

Mel Robbins 43:21 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 43:21 ... right? Through the kind of demands that you've got on yourself. But remember we said at the outset, attention is external and internal. And if the scenarios that we are crafting in our mind are simulations of those high-demand circumstances, that also seems to deplete attention.

Mel Robbins 43:40 Okay, so let me just see if I can get this. Hold on a second. Because the brain doesn't truly know the difference between doing the real thing versus being up in your mind, thinking and worrying about the thing, both of which require you to tap the attention system. And you're basically saying, any time you spend worrying about what's coming or ruminating about what's happening, you're not only using the attention system, you are stressing it out and weakening it before the actual thing you're worried about.

Dr. Amishi Jha 44:20 Absolutely. So that is don't deploy before you deploy. It's a, it's a real w- it's a really wise reminder that says there is no need to continue to stimulate in that way because actually, life is happening right now. I mean, I think what she was calling upon was, you know, her husband was gone every other year in those early days of, of, um, post-9/11. And he was missing his children, he was missing his time with his spouse because he was already in, back in, uh, the war zone. So I think that's a really powerful reminder to tell us that we should really be thinking about not just the challenges ahead, but the costs of being in those challenges before they arise. What are we missing if we do that?

Mel Robbins 45:05 So one of the things that you recommend, based on decades of research in terms of training your brain and strengthening the attention system, is 12 minutes of, a day of mindfulness training. How the heck did you arrive at that specific time?

Dr. Amishi Jha 45:22 (laughs)

Mel Robbins 45:22 12 minutes.

Dr. Amishi Jha 45:23 Yeah, I mean, it was a, a long journey to figure it out, but basically, I knew that if we were dealing with busy people with consequential jobs, and frankly, again, that's all of us, we don't wanna spend a moment more than is needed. We needed a minimum effective dose. So let's even, let's talk about the term meditation 'cause I wanna kinda demystify that-

Mel Robbins 45:40 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 45:40 ... as well. From the neuroscience point of view, uh, m- meditation, which is part of every major, uh, world spiritual, uh, tradition, yeah, I see it as engaging in specific activities to cultivate specific mental qualities. So-

Mel Robbins 45:57 In, in specific ways. Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 45:57 ... think about the analogy of the term meditation to the term sports, right?

Mel Robbins 46:01 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 46:01 It's like a sport.

Mel Robbins 46:02 Yeah.

Dr. Amishi Jha 46:02 You have a general category of, okay, yeah, you're doing something, it's physical, but there are a whole variety of sports. What somebody has to do to become an Olympic-level, you know, gymnast is very different than going and golfing.

Mel Robbins 46:14 Got it.

Dr. Amishi Jha 46:15 So the specificity matters and-

Mel Robbins 46:17 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 46:17 But it tells us that m- meditation is a good umbrella term for a category of human activity to cultivate something-

Mel Robbins 46:23 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 46:23 ... usually good stuff, right?

Mel Robbins 46:25 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 46:25 Um, that's why we would say it's connected to wisdom and, and spiritual, uh, uh, uh, practices. Mindfulness meditation is a very specific way that we're gonna do exercises to cultivate a mindful mode, and I'll, I'll tell you what I think that means. So mindfulness is a mental mode. It's a, we all can be mindful. And that mode, meaning a way to make your mind, has to do with paying attention to our present moment experience in a particular way.

Mel Robbins 46:56 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 46:56 So what's the particular way? I would say paying attention to the here and now without reacting to what's going on, or what I'm gonna say is conceptually elaborating on what's happening. So plainly saying, be in the here and the now without a story about it.

Mel Robbins 47:13 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 47:13 That's what you're doing when you're being mindful. Now, we can do that. I mean, th- think of the last time that you've really felt, you know, it was a beautiful sunset or a conversation with a partner. We can be mindful. And the challenge i- the reason that we have mindfulness meditation is because we want ready access to that mental mode on demand. So we've gotta cultivate through practices, getting ourselves to exercise that way of being so that it arrives in our mind and is strengthened to be present and ac- accessible to us at any time.

Mel Robbins 47:45 What does that have to do with attention?

Dr. Amishi Jha 47:46 Okay. So let's ta- thank you, because I think that that's, it's, uh, it, the term mindfulness has the word attention in it, present-centered attention.

Mel Robbins 47:55 Well, the reason why I'm, I'm, like, trying to be very specific is because there's a lot of information about meditation.

Dr. Amishi Jha 48:05 Yeah, absolutely.

Mel Robbins 48:06 But you have a research-backed, rigorous, scientific recommendation-

Dr. Amishi Jha 48:15 Yup.

Mel Robbins 48:16 ... based on being a world-renowned neuroscientist who is the expert on the system of attention in your brain, how it works, how stress impacts it, the fact that it can be strengthened, and your recommendation is a particular...... type of meditation that is going to help you build and strengthen the attention system.

Dr. Amishi Jha 48:44 Right.

Mel Robbins 48:45 And so, I wanna make sure that as you're listening or watching this, you understand the foundation and the context for where this recommendation is coming from.

Dr. Amishi Jha 48:55 Absolutely.

Mel Robbins 48:56 Okay, cool.

Dr. Amishi Jha 48:56 So, let's connect the dots between what I talked about with regard to these three systems of attention-

Mel Robbins 49:00 Great.

Dr. Amishi Jha 49:01 ... and a mindfulness meditation exercise.

Mel Robbins 49:03 Okay, great.

Dr. Amishi Jha 49:04 Okay. So, um, because we already know, the definition of mindfulness, attention is front and center. But it's that specific way of not being reactive to what's going on, getting the raw data of our moment to moment experience. So in a, in a mindfulness meditation practice, and I'm gonna give you just one very common example-

Mel Robbins 49:21 Great.

Dr. Amishi Jha 49:21 Um, and, uh, what we need to do is pick an anchor for our attention. So let's say you decide you're gonna do one of these 12-minute practices.

Mel Robbins 49:29 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 49:30 I would instruct you to sit down in a comfortable position, doesn't matter if sitting, sitting on the floor, chair, doesn't matter to me. Uh, but comfortable, alert, present centered, with your intention. So, um, the anchor, the instruction that I'm gonna give you is pick an anchor for your attention. Pick an anchor for-

Mel Robbins 49:51 What does that mean?

Dr. Amishi Jha 49:51 ... where you're going to direct that flashlight for 12 minutes. And I'm gonna give you the anchor this time. I'm gonna ask you to use the sensations of your breath as the anchor for your attention. And this practice is called, um, mindfulness of the breath.

Mel Robbins 50:05 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 50:05 So, the first thing you do is you settle in t- to sitting.

Mel Robbins 50:10 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 50:11 We've been breathing this whole time, but now we're gonna pay attention-

Mel Robbins 50:12 (laughs) Once you said it, I was like, I literally-

Dr. Amishi Jha 50:15 (laughs) .

Mel Robbins 50:15 ... was like, "Am I breathing?"

Dr. Amishi Jha 50:16 Exactly. No, you're breathing, you're breathing.

Mel Robbins 50:18 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 50:18 We'd have bigger problems if you weren't breathing. You're breathing. But now, you're gonna actually take that attentional flashlight and pick something specific tied to breathing, and the sensory experience of breathing, to focus it. So it could be the coolness of air moving in and out of your nostrils, could be your abdomen moving in and out. For the, for the period of time we're gonna do this practice, take that flashlight of your attention and direct it to those breath-related sensations. All right? Step... You just did step one. You found an anchor, you got your attentional flashlight on it. The second step. Notice, as we're progressing through this practice, notice, where is your attention? Is it still on the breath-related sensation? Or has it gone away somewhere else?

Mel Robbins 51:02 Oh, it's already gone. I was thinking about step two.

Dr. Amishi Jha 51:04 Exactly. Step two is notice where your attention is. And if you notice, 'cause it'll happen, it's very normal, that the mind has wandered away from that anchor, step three, refocus. Get it back. So, you're holding your flashlight, you're directing it toward breath-related sensations. You're finding your flashlight, where did it go? And once you find it, you're refocusing. And this is what I describe as the push-up for the mind. Focusing, noticing, refocusing, repeat. So, when we do a mindfulness practice, we are doing push-ups for the mind to strengthen, connecting it back to attention, all three of those systems of attention. The flashlight, we're holding it, we're pointing it. The floodlight, we're broad, receptive, noticing what's happening right now. Alert to what's happening right now. And the juggler, where's my task? Am I on the task or not? Is my, am I following my goal-directed behavior? Uh, maybe I'm not. Let's get it back.

Mel Robbins 52:00 Wow.

Dr. Amishi Jha 52:01 All three systems get engaged. And through that repeated engagement of doing this 12 minutes a day, we strengthen our attention.

Mel Robbins 52:08 I can see how that would work. So let's talk about the 12-

Dr. Amishi Jha 52:11 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 52:11 ... minutes because-

Dr. Amishi Jha 52:12 So-

Mel Robbins 52:12 Because I know that the person listening is a lot like me. It's like, "Okay, tell me exactly what to do."

Dr. Amishi Jha 52:16 Right.

Mel Robbins 52:16 "Am I setting a timer? Why is it 12?"

Dr. Amishi Jha 52:18 Yeah, let's-

Mel Robbins 52:18 "If I, if I do it for eight, am I not gonna get the benefit? Should I do it longer if I'm an overachiever?" Like, what is it about 12, based on the research, that this makes it the magic number to train your mind?

Dr. Amishi Jha 52:29 Yeah. So, it is the minimum effective dose, meaning get to 12. If you do more, the more you do, the more you benefit.

Mel Robbins 52:35 Really?

Dr. Amishi Jha 52:36 Yes. Absolutely. It is like physical exercise.

Mel Robbins 52:39 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 52:39 The more push-ups you do, the more, you know, upper body strength you're gonna have. So the, how we came to this number was actually because we gave people the instruction to do a lot more than 12. You know, most mindfulness programs will say 45 minutes a day-

Mel Robbins 52:52 Oh, my gosh.

Dr. Amishi Jha 52:52 ... seven days a week.

Mel Robbins 52:53 What? That, who, who has that time?

Dr. Amishi Jha 52:56 Most of us don't (laughs) . And frankly, most people don't do it even if they're in those programs. In our initial studies with military service members and other, you know, firefighters, other groups, we said, "Do 30 minutes." We thought, "Okay, well, they're not gonna do 45, so let's try 30." What we also did is we said, for, "Tell us how much you're doing." So every week, they had a log. Every time they practiced, they'd have to enter it. And we said, "Just be honest with us. This is part of a research study. Be honest with us." And they were.

Mel Robbins 53:21 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 53:21 Some said zero. They didn't do anything. Others told us exactly how much they did. Almost no one did 30 minutes. Maybe we had one person that did 30 minutes. Everybody else was in some range from nothing to 30.

Mel Robbins 53:32 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 53:32 And what we wanted to see, 'cause we had these objective measures of attention, and in some cases, even brain metrics, we wanted to see, was there some point in that long ran- in that broad range where we could see, "If they do this much, we're starting to see that the brain and attention are looking like they're being benefited."

Mel Robbins 53:48 Wow.

Dr. Amishi Jha 53:48 "And if they do less, we're not seeing it."

Mel Robbins 53:50 Wow.

Dr. Amishi Jha 53:51 And that number was 12 minutes. When people did 12 minutes or more, their attention was protected and strengthened. And if they did less, it was not.

Mel Robbins 54:00 You're kidding.

Dr. Amishi Jha 54:01 No. Not kidding (laughs) .

Mel Robbins 54:02 So you could do less. You could be meditating every day for less than 12 minutes, and you're not getting-

Dr. Amishi Jha 54:07 It's not reaching that threshold. In some ways, this makes sense to us, right? So if I said, you know, "There's gonna be, you have to do 150 minutes of cardiovascular, uh, moderate intensity exercise to benefit your heart." If you say, "I don't wanna do 150 minutes. I'm gonna go for a walk every now and then," is your heart gonna benefit? Probably not. So there is something about reaching that sort of sweet spot of challenge and engagement that can do the trick. What we did after that, 'cause, you know, this was just happenstance. We found that 12 minutes was it, but that wasn't really a test. We went on after that, and we said, "Let's prescribe people 12 minutes."

Mel Robbins 54:37 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 54:37 "Let's tell them to do 12 minutes." Initially, we said, "Do 12 minutes, seven days a week." And the good news was, people were much more likely to do 12 minutes than they were 30. So they were actually doing it. Most people were not doing seven days a week. So we looked again. How many days a week should they do these 12 minutes to actually get benefits? And the number was four days a week.

Mel Robbins 54:58 I could do that.

Dr. Amishi Jha 54:59 So our, our prescription now is a-... 12 minutes a day, four days a week, and do this for at least four weeks to get you, get the ball rolling. And then continue that as much as possible, because that's gonna be a way to keep that attention system strong.

Mel Robbins 55:12 And if I do 12 minutes a day, four days a week, for four weeks-

Dr. Amishi Jha 55:18 Yes.

Mel Robbins 55:19 ... based on the research studies that you've done, what would I experience?

Dr. Amishi Jha 55:24 So, let's first talk about what would happen if you didn't do that.

Mel Robbins 55:27 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 55:27 The group that gets no training at all. You're undergoing a high-stress interval, you know, whether it's fire season as a firefighter or an undergrad in an academic semester, whatever it is.

Mel Robbins 55:34 Whatever, caregiver, or first responder-

Dr. Amishi Jha 55:36 K-

Mel Robbins 55:36 ... or you work in a hospital as-

Dr. Amishi Jha 55:37 Exactly.

Mel Robbins 55:37 ... a nurse, or, oh my god.

Dr. Amishi Jha 55:38 Exactly.

Mel Robbins 55:38 Like...

Dr. Amishi Jha 55:39 You know, a teacher going through the, the end of the school year. Um, if you don't do that, and we track your attention, your attention is going to be worse, objectively, your stress levels are gonna be higher, and your mood is going to be worse. You're gonna have higher negative mood and less positive mood. Everything is going the direction of bad news. If you do this 12 minutes, and now, this is not just me guessing, we've now confirmed this after study after study, you don't show that pattern. Attention is stable over time. It doesn't decline. The comparison group that didn't do it, same exact circumstances, declined. If people do more than 12 minutes, they actually look a little bit better than where they started. Same thing with mood. Mood doesn't s- tank, it actually stays stable. You know, positive mood actually looks not a- impacted. Uh, negative mood, not worse. Um, again, more they do, they can even improve beyond that. Same thing with stress levels. So everything is starting to look like you're protected and strengthening if you achieve that number.

Mel Robbins 56:36 If you're not in a period of stress-

Dr. Amishi Jha 56:38 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 56:38 ... but you just wanna do better-

Dr. Amishi Jha 56:39 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 56:40 ... what happens if you do this 12 minutes a day, four days a week, for four weeks?

Dr. Amishi Jha 56:45 Really good news, you're gonna get better than where you started.

Mel Robbins 56:48 And what does that look like?

Dr. Amishi Jha 56:50 Your-

Mel Robbins 56:50 Happier, more focused-

Dr. Amishi Jha 56:51 Exactly.

Mel Robbins 56:51 ... more energy?

Dr. Amishi Jha 56:52 So, exactly, you're, you're, you're gonna feel, in general, um, I don't wanna promise happiness, okay? Because that is a slippery slope.

Mel Robbins 56:58 Yeah, of course.

Dr. Amishi Jha 56:59 You will be more aware of what you're experiencing moment by moment. You will be more capable of holding that attentional flashlight and directing it willfully. Negativity may arise, but you notice it for what it is, and you relate to it differently so that you're not ruminating and stuck or catastrophizing, but you see it and respond responsibly toward yourself.

Mel Robbins 57:20 It sounds like you have more power and more peace 'cause you're not as reactive and your attention isn't as easily hijacked. Because it's interesting, when I'm really stressed out or, you know, we, we did a tour this year, and at the end of it, I was so gassed from just the non-stop travel and the performance and being out of schedule and just all in, j- just all, going into an experience like that, that in that state, I was more likely ... I was on my phone more, I was mindlessly scrolling, I was procrastinating, I was irritable. And now that I understand everything that you've taught us, it makes so much sense because the stress of all of that and the fatigue had weakened my attention system, which made me so much more susceptible to more stress, more distraction, being really annoyed about everything and frustrated and irritable. Oh my gosh.

Dr. Amishi Jha 58:22 Absolutely.

Mel Robbins 58:23 Well, let's get specific about how you implement this, 'cause I think this is really exciting that in 12 minutes a day, for free, you can utilize this research to strengthen your attention system and train your brain. Is, should you set a timer if you're new to this?

Dr. Amishi Jha 58:39 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 58:39 You know what I mean?

Dr. Amishi Jha 58:40 So after we've been, you know, we've been doing this, uh, research now for about 15 years in the military. So, and at the end of my, uh, book, I actually gave the entire prescription. It's all written out. Like, this is what you do on day one and day two, like basically for the four weeks, what you need to do. So my intention for all of this, um, is really to give people a very simple way-

Mel Robbins 59:02 Yup.

Dr. Amishi Jha 59:02 ... to invest and, and do this, but I would also just wanna say that, you know, if you do happen to have something like, uh, you know, somebody listening might have attention deficit disorder, that's a difficult goal. And if you jump in with an expectation that you're gonna do this, you're gonna white-knuckle your way through, uh, and then all of a sudden at the end of this time, you should feel blissful, productive, happy, that's the wrong mindset to go in.

Mel Robbins 59:27 What's the right mindset?

Dr. Amishi Jha 59:28 So, well, well, I'll just tell you, for the adults that we've worked with with ADD, we didn't start them off with 12 minutes a day. We didn't have them do stillness practices where they were closing their eyes and focusing on the breath. We started with very active practices. They're walking, they're moving, uh, sometimes even interactive practices where they're listening to other people. It wasn't until the end of eight weeks that we built them up to 12 minutes a day. So the solution for different people may vary depending on their particular circumstances, um, but this is a good sort of general way to approach it to strengthen, strengthen attention.

Mel Robbins 1:00:00 You know, I, I, I'm, I can feel the person that's listening leaning in, and I know they've already shared this with somebody that they care about, because I do think the research is very exciting. And the way you explained just that one exercise felt immediately accessible. Do you set a timer? Is that the best way to start?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:00:22 Before we even start a timer for 12 minutes, there's another thing I'd want people to do.

Mel Robbins 1:00:25 Great. What do you do?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:00:27 Start by figuring out when in your day you're gonna do this.

Mel Robbins 1:00:30 Now, is there a, a, a better time based on the research?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:00:32 The best time to do it is th- when you're gonna do it.

Mel Robbins 1:00:35 (laughs)

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:00:36 That is the best time to do it.

Mel Robbins 1:00:38 (laughs)

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:00:38 So the, the, um, operating principle is this. Stack it into something you already have the habit of doing. You know, you brush your teeth every day at a certain time. You always have your morning cup of coffee. Wedge it in there and have the goal be to have an extremely small amount of time. So if you think you can do 12 minutes, start with three minutes.

Mel Robbins 1:00:55 Oh, I love that. Now, why?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:00:57 Because-None of this will matter unless you have it as part of your routine to actually engage in it. You know, this is not... Mindfulness training is not about understanding what mindfulness is. I love that people will listen to this and understand, hopefully, what mindfulness is and what attention is. Will it actually make their attention stronger to under- understand that? It will not. It very much is like physical exercise. You have to do it to benefit. So, the most important thing is that you figure out when you're going to do it. And be reasonable with yourself. So, start with, uh, three minutes and see if you can do it for a week, four days in a week. If you can do that for a couple weeks, maybe increase it to six minutes. If you feel good about that, then move on to the 12-minute path. And do it not only for the one exercise that you might be doing these shorter-term practices with, but round it out so you have the full scope of the suite of practices.

Mel Robbins 1:01:49 I think that's so great, Dr. Amishi, that you're so realistic and encouraging.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:01:54 (laughs) .

Mel Robbins 1:01:54 And that these simple details that, okay, stick it in wherever you'll do it. Don't, don't fuss about getting it right. I, I lo-... It feels like something that you could actually do. Okay, when I sit down-

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:02:10 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 1:02:10 ...and have my coffee, instead of wasting 22 minutes looking at social media and reading emails before I head off to work, why not sp- set the timer for three minutes?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:02:18 Set the timer. Like you said, you were asking me if you should set a timer. Yes, set a timer, make it that simple. You could do it with a buddy. You know, say every day at, you know, right around nine o'clock, let's just get on the, let's get on the phone or let's FaceTime each other, we can both have our eyes closed and just do these three minutes together. So, that would be the first thing, is get in the habit of doing it.

Mel Robbins 1:02:35 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:02:35 Set your, set your goal to be very, very, um, a small amount of time every day. But there's a second important thing I want people to be thinking about if they wanna go on this journey, which is, let's be reasonable about what to expect. This is not... Mindfulness training is not about having unbridled joy and peace instantly. We are not doing this with any end goal other than being more aware of what is happening to us moment by moment. And sometimes if people have the expectation that it's going to be, um, joyful or have them feel really, really positive, the, they will be very disappointed. Because usually what people find is, like, "Oh my gosh, my mind is really a mess."

Mel Robbins 1:03:16 (laughs)

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:03:16 "I mind wander a lot." And so I wanna just start out by saying, if you notice that your mind is wandering, if you spend 3 minutes or 12 minutes noticing that your mind is wandering a lot, that is a win. That is a win. You now understand the nature of what is going on.

Mel Robbins 1:03:31 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:03:32 You're watching your mind. You're cultivating a friendship that's there, s- with you, saying, "Here we are. Ah, look, we drifted away. Let's get ourselves back." And, you know, the more we deepen, we might even start noticing, "Oh, there's a kind of a flavor of what I'm drifting toward."

Mel Robbins 1:03:45 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:03:45 "Maybe that's something I'm gonna consider after my practice is over." You know, so we start develop... When I say we develop a friendship and an intimacy with our own mind and our own life, that's what I mean. So, it's not about forcing anything, and it's not about false expectations that you're gonna instantly be

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:04:01 very focused or very happy. It really is about better awareness of what's happening to you moment by moment in your life.

Mel Robbins 1:04:09 Mm-hmm. S- Dr. Amishi, can you tell us, like, a, a-another example of one of these 12-minute exercises?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:04:15 Sure, absolutely, yeah.

Mel Robbins 1:04:15 Like, just to give us a sense of the breadth of-

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:04:17 Absolutely.

Mel Robbins 1:04:18 ...the different things you can do?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:04:19 Yeah. So, you know, there's really... I mean, I'll tell you all, I, I'll give you the general idea of what-

Mel Robbins 1:04:22 Right.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:04:22 ...all, all four of them are. These are, by the way, you know, I'm sitting here, I'm talking to you, I'm talking to you from a neuroscience point of view. But these practices are part of the world's wisdom traditions. There are many teachers, there are many apps. Like, you know, and I use the language of attention in the way that I describe it. So, this breath awareness practice we talked about-

Mel Robbins 1:04:39 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:04:40 ...where you focus on your breath, your mind wanders, I call that the find your flashlight practice. And I did that on purpose because it's not about, "Get your flashlight-"

Mel Robbins 1:04:47 (laughs) .

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:04:47 "...where it needs to be and stay there." It's like, no, no, no. Find it. Where is it? Oh, there it is, let's get it back. It's a more gentle, self-supportive, and very clear set of instructions. It's not-

Mel Robbins 1:04:58 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:04:58 ..."Let your flashlight go over wherever it wants." It's, "Find it, so that you can get it back to the goal." Um, the other kinds of practices are really around these same ideas. And again, I use the language of attention. So, the n- the next in the sequence is something called the body scan. So, I love that at the top of our conversation you were saying, "Hey, is it about just the eyes and ears?" No, it's about attention to much more, including the rest of the body. So in this practice, we sort of up the ante a little bit. It's not about one sensory experience and returning our flashlight there. It's about scanning the body.

Mel Robbins 1:05:31 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:05:31 So, we start with the tips of the toes, and we say, "Okay," and y- and you're guided to do this. So, you're gonna focus your flashlight on the, you know, the, your big toe, and you're gonna kind of progress through the body.

Mel Robbins 1:05:41 Yeah.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:05:42 And again, wherever you're being guided to pay attention, you're gonna wander off, you're gonna come back. And this allows you to have sort of a moving target, if you will. But the other really powerful aspect of this body scan practice, which is what it's called, is you start really understanding what's going on in the body. And what you start even getting a sense of is, "Oh, sometimes when I'm, like, having a really hard time, um, you know, and it get to my shoulders and I feel like there's a knot in my shoulders, it's accompanied by a particular thought or a set of emotions or a memory." So, we're getting a sense that the body is embodying what our mind and our life is all about. And that helps us, again, grow in a familiarity and intimacy about w- what's going on with us. So, the body scan practice still strengthens all three of the systems of attention, and has this extra bonus of making us more familiar with our embodied life.

Mel Robbins 1:06:35 Can you just, like, walk me through, like, toes to knees so we can get a sense of what this is like?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:06:40 Yeah, sure.

Mel Robbins 1:06:41 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:06:41 Sure. All right. So go ahead and sit comfortable, upright, alert posture. And you can lower or close your eyes, whichever you prefer. And let's just start by just, just three deeper breaths, just to kinda anchor ourselves here and now. Just breathing in.Breathing out. Breathing in. And out. And one more time. And now that we are here, with our bodies fully present, sitting and breathing, let's take that flashlight of attention and point it to our big toe. Just direct it there. All you're doing with your flashlight there is just noticing any sensations happening in the big toe. Pick a side. Let's say, your left toe. What's going on? Coolness, tingling, or maybe no sensation at all. And now, move your flashlight to the rest of your toes. Just broaden it out a little bit, checking out what's going on in the rest of the toes. Move the flashlight up to your ankle on your left leg. Staying right there with the sensations in the left ankle. If your mind wanders, no problem. Just return it back to this part of the body. And you can now guide your flashlight up to your calf. What do you feel there? Tension, maybe soreness, coolness. Try to get really granular in the sensory experience that's going on right now in this part of the body. Your mind may drift away. That's okay. Just notice it and bring the flashlight of attention back. And finally, let's move up to the knee, the left knee. The front of the knee, the back of the knee. Noticing what's going on right now in this part of the body. And as we end this practice, let's just take the entire lower part of our left leg, broaden the flashlight out so we've got the entire part, from tips of the toes all the way to the knee. We're shining our flashlight there, paying attention to this part of the body. And when you're ready, in the next moment or two, feel free to open your eyes and return your attention back to us.

Mel Robbins 1:10:38 That was pretty cool. First of all, you have an incredible voice for guided meditation.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:10:42 Aw, thanks. (laughs)

Mel Robbins 1:10:43 Very, very soothing. But I cannot believe how wandering my mind is. Like, every time you had a cue, I would go, and then my mind was somewhere else. Like, when you cued the ankle, you know what my thought was? "Wait." (laughs) "Is the ankle on both sides of your legs or is it only on the outside?" (laughs) "Is there an inner ankle or is there a..." (laughs) And then I started going, "Why do I not know this?" You know what I mean? (laughs) Like...

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:11:13 Totally fine, but that's really cool that you noticed that. That is really a win. So the fact that you noticed, wow, I had this whole, like, conversation. When I said mindfulness is about paying attention to our present moment experience without conceptual elaboration, you just experienced conceptual elaboration. So, and you caught it. You said, "Ah, look at me, I'm just, like, proliferating all these thoughts."

Mel Robbins 1:11:33 Yes.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:11:34 And then all, the good news is, all you need to do when that happens is back to the ankle.

Mel Robbins 1:11:39 Yeah, I just would go, like, "Okay, flashlight back on the outside."

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:11:41 Yeah, that's it.

Mel Robbins 1:11:41 "We're just gonna go with the outside. We're not gonna think about the inside. Now I'm, now I'm making thoughts again, so we're gonna go back on the outside," (laughs) like, it was... It's really fascinating because now that we have the baseline understanding of the three parts of the attention system-

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:11:55 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 1:11:56 ... you can see how you go from focus, to broad, to then the juggler, juggler, the juggler. (laughs)

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:12:07 Executive functioning, yeah. (laughs)

Mel Robbins 1:12:08 Yeah, the executive function grabbing the flashlight, you know.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:12:11 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 1:12:11 "Come on now, back here."

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:12:12 Yeah.

Mel Robbins 1:12:13 It's really neat how it uses all three of those things.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:12:17 That's right. Over and over again. And there's no mandate that says you can't just begin again. You know, let's say I talked about the ankle and you totally missed it. Well, you can go back to the ankle.

Mel Robbins 1:12:28 Yeah.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:12:29 Um, or you notice, "Oh, there's something really, like, I'm getting a strange sensation in this part of the, the knee," and you start getting captured by that. That's okay. Notice it's just a thought.

Mel Robbins 1:12:39 Well, what, what else is cool about this is that you can do it anywhere. Like, whenever I get on a plane, I have got my book, I'm doing all this stuff. I'm, like, texting every... My husband drops in. He closes his eyes. He just drops into a meditation practice. And so while I'm basically stressing myself out-

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:13:00 (laughs)

Mel Robbins 1:13:00 ... and maxing my attention system-... Chris is over there doing reps-

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:13:04 (laughs)

Mel Robbins 1:13:04 ... in the seat next to me. Like, you could be doing this waiting at a doctor's appointment.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:13:09 (laughs)

Mel Robbins 1:13:09 You could be doing this, you know, during a boring meeting at work, and nobody even knows. Like, you could do this anytime you want.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:13:16 Anytime you want. And I do have a little recommendation for when people... How people can get started, even if they don't want to start with the-

Mel Robbins 1:13:21 Please. Yes.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:13:21 ... formal recommendation.

Mel Robbins 1:13:22 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:13:23 And it's like doing a mini-practice. So, this is something called the STOP practice. And if you wanna remember when to do it, do it anytime you're stopped. Like-

Mel Robbins 1:13:32 Oh, like sitting at a traffic light or anywhere?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:13:34 Standing at an elevator.

Mel Robbins 1:13:36 Or standing in line at a store.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:13:37 Standing in line at a store.

Mel Robbins 1:13:38 Okay.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:13:38 You know, anytime you're stopped. Yeah, and by the way, if you're not stopped, you can feel free to stop. So, it's a, it's an acronym, the STOP practice itself, and it, it's like this. So, first is S, stop. Literally stop. So, don't move. Just stay still. T, take a breath. O, observe. And that really is this broad res- um, receptive quality of like, "What's going on right now?" P, proceed.

Mel Robbins 1:14:11 That's beautiful. Really, really cool. I love how you are so driven to help people and to make a difference with this research. I mean, I realize that's why researchers do research, but you can just... It comes through-

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:14:25 Mm.

Mel Robbins 1:14:25 ... in your passion for it, and the heart that's behind it. Um, you know, in... Toward the end of your book, you have this incredible, beautiful section that is labeled, "Attention is your highest form of love." And there is this wonderful quote. This is on page 251. "To me, a peak mind is not about perfection or being at some imaginary pinnacle, like you might see on a successory poster, the woman on a mountaintop, arms flung in the air, relishing her peak experience. A peak mind is not about striving to get somewhere else. It's simpler, more elegant, and doable. I think of it like a triangle. The base is the present moment, and the sides are two forms of attention. One side, receptive attention, so we can notice, observe, and be. And the other side, concentrative attention, so we are focused and flexible." Why is your attention your highest form of love?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:15:39 I mean, if you think about it from your own experience, how do you experience care from another person? It starts with attention. And extending care starts with attention.

Mel Robbins 1:15:54 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:15:54 So, from my point of view, one of the real values of cultivating your attention is to use it in the service of the deepest and most meaningful things that we do in our lives as it relates to our relationships with other people.

Mel Robbins 1:16:06 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:16:07 So, it is a form of love. Attention is a form of love. It's the most you can give of yourself. It is literally giving the full capacity of your brain and devoting it to another person.

Mel Robbins 1:16:19 That is so beautiful.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:16:21 (laughs)

Mel Robbins 1:16:21 I would love for you to speak directly to the person that's been here with us, just listening and learning from you. And there's so much that you shared with us, that you taught us, um, that you've given to us, so thank you. But if there was one thing that they were to do after hearing all of this from you, what do you think the most important thing to do is?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:16:50 The biggest call to action, and it's a very simple one, is pay attention to your attention.

Mel Robbins 1:16:57 Mm.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:16:58 Really pay attention to your attention. It is the most powerful thing you can do for yourself and advantaging everything else in your life. And it's not a big to-do. It's literally checking in and seeing where it is.

Mel Robbins 1:17:12 Dr. Amishi, what are your parting words?

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:17:16 My big thing that I want to say to everybody that's listening is that, you know, we now know in 2025 that daily physical exercise is necessary for our physical health. And I'm very happy to say that now we also know that there is something we can do to exercise our mind so that our wellbeing and our mind's health can be optimal. And you can do this with investing as little as 12 minutes a day.

Mel Robbins 1:17:45 Well, all I can say is thank you for being here. Thank you for teaching us all of this. Thank you for the work and the research that you do. Thank you for the difference that you're making. Um, it is true that where your attention flows determines your experience of life. And I am grateful that I feel like so much smarter.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:18:07 (laughs)

Mel Robbins 1:18:08 I, I've never understood the system of attention the way I do now. I've never understood more simply what is going on in an ADHD brain. And I've never felt better equipped and empowered to do something 12 minutes a day to train my mind and to really strengthen my attention. And I know that that will directly impact my life in a very, very positive way, and it will impact the person's life who's listening. So, thank you, thank you, thank you, Dr. Amishi.

Dr. Amishi Jha 1:18:39 Aw. Thank you so much.

Mel Robbins 1:18:40 You're welcome. And I also want to thank you. Thank you for, for being here. Your time, your attention are the most valuable things that you have in life. And the fact that you spend time and you give me your attention, I do not take that lightly. It is a privilege. So, I am so honored to be here with you. I'm also proud of you for spending your time and pouring your attention into listening to something or watching something that'll make your life better. That is so cool. And in case no one else tells you today, as your friend, I want to tell you that I love you and I believe in you and your ability to create a better life. And being present for your life and protecting your attention, wow, that's gonna make a huge difference. So, thank you for being here. Alrighty, I will see you in the very next episode. I'll be waiting to welcome you in the moment you hit play. I'll see you there. I wanna thank you for giving us your attention and being here watching this on YouTube with us. I d- I, I don't take that lightly. So, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I also wanna thank you for hitting subscribe. It's one way that you can support me and the team who is doing so much to try to support you. I mean, didn't you just love this? Thank you for hitting subscribe. Thank you for sharing this. And I know you're thinking, "All right, Mel, enough. Tell me what I should watch next." You're gonna love this video. This is definitely worth your attention. And I will be waiting to welcome you in the moment you hit play. I'll see you there.